Tyler Hunt

I’ve always found the concept of open source media to be appealing. The thought of having access to raw video footage or recording studio tracks offers a sense of freedom and adventure that may be attractive merely because it is so contrary to the will of the RIAA and MPAA. Apparently Claire and Sherm were thinking along these same lines when they came up with the Jay-Z Construction Set. With nine variations on The Black Album, and a load of samples and breaks, it’s designed to be a self-contained starter kit to creating your very own Jay-Z remix. This brings up a lot of legal implications, but by distributing it through BitTorrent they seem to have avoided any lawsuits or cease and desist letters up to this point.

Here are a few of the albums I have bought recently that I think are worth checking out. I’ve been wanting to have a way to show the music I’m currently into, so this may become a regular feature.

Sunny Day Real Estate
Diary
A truly great collection of songs that has become engrained in my brain to the point of familiarity beyond reason. It’s emo at it’s best.

Modest Mouse
Good News For People Who Love Bad News
Lauren mentioned her love of Modest Mouse once, so I picked up the new one today for her for her birthday, and bought a copy for myself as well. It has grown on me pretty quickly and I think it has the potentional to quickly become part of my frequently played list.

Nickel Creek
This Side
Erin first discovered Nickel Creek in her brother’s vast collection of good music, and has been spreading the love ever since. I picked this up last week and love the rawness of the acoustic instruments and the varied blend of male and female vocals.

Browsing through MusicMoz for Starsailor the other day, I noticed there was nothing but a few links for the band. I submitted an album, and then found my way to the join page for becoming an editor. I’ve made a lot of web sites in my time, but I’ve never really been an editor or moderator for any of the many community-driven sites I’ve been a part of over the years. Until now. My application was accepted, and except for the fact that Erin thinks I’m a complete nerd for doing it, this isn’t really a big deal. It’s kind of cool though to be given the authority and power to modify the content of a site. It satisfies a need inside of me to produce something that can be appreciated by the world. Albeit a very small portion of the world, but even that little bit means a lot to me. I’ll most likely never end up doing all that much with these newfound privileges, but having the ability to make changes and additions to the site might help resolve some of my peeves about imcomplete data and such. Erin is totally right, I’m such a nerd.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the sales figures for 2003 show that album sales are up nearly eight per cent. This despite all of the piracy that the RIAA is up in arms about. The sale of singles, however, has been dropping steadily. It makes a lot more sense to relate this figure to piracy, since most of what is downloaded is singles. I never understood the concept of a CD single. If you want to hear the song before the full album is released, you can just turn on the radio. I guess from a collectors perspective they make more sense since they often include other rare releases that can’t be found on any other albums, but such dedicated collectors only make up a very small portion of the market. Maybe dropping a few singles for a single is appealing to the teenybopper’s allowance, as well, but other than that I don’t see much of a market for the sparse discs.

It’s good that there’s evidence that piracy isn’t killing the music industry though. Not that I really care about the RIAA, it’s just nice to have something to contradict their propoganda. Piracy is still wrong and illegal, but it’s not the greatest evil in the world by far. You would never know it though by the way they’re tracking down teenage fileswappers like the United States hunts terrorists.

Oddly enough, I think my musical tastes have been changing a lot over the last couple weeks. If I had heard Death Cab for Cutie a month ago, I might have been slightly entertained, but not willing to claim them as my own. Since then, I’ve expanded my library to include their Transatlanticism album, as well as the most recent releases from Bright Eyes and the Postal Service. A big thanks goes out to Erin for introducing me to the Postal Service. This collarboration between Death Cab’s lead singer Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello, which merges the smooth emo lyrics of Death Cab with a subtle electronic beat, placing it into the fringe of a genre known as IDM.

When I started this post earlier today, I had no idea where it was going. But Erin came through again and lent me her collection of the best CDs ever, so I will have ample new music for many days to come. She truly is the coolest chicken ever.

I didn’t really starting get into music until some time after mix tapes were on their way out. In fact, I don’t think I was even aware of the process until I saw the movie High Fidelity. These days, with CD burners in every computer and digital downloads becoming mainstream, the mix tape medium has found its place in the book of music history. Then I came across Steven Garrity’s Acts of Volition blog and radio program. This format could very well be considered the new mix tape. Combining recorded music with commentary, each playlist has been thought out and hand selected to fit together into a single cohesive unit.

The title “Acts of Volition” couldn’t be more fitting, since the very act of putting together a coherent track listing is a series of conscious choices. This format is also a great way to discover new artists (some of them Canadian), as each song’s commentary provides a word-of-mouth effect. There are currently six sessions available, so try one out and let me know what you think.

There was some question of whether or not Outkast’s multi-platinum album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was counted per album or per disc. This shuold clear things up (and settle any Chipotle bets that may be at stake):

According to its criteria, the RIAA counts each unit within a multi-disc set toward its total, so 1.5 million copies sold are counted as the 3 million for certification purposes.

This doesn’t seem to make too much sense, but then again, nothing the RIAA does makes much sense, including their new anti-piracy campaign, What’s the Download.

The rumors about an iTunes/Pepsi marketing campaign have been flying for quite some time now, and it was recently discovered that a Super Bowl commercial has been in the works. Today Apple updated their homepage in preparation for Sunday’s new ad, which features Green Day’s version of “I Fought the Law.” The press release also indicates there will be four other commercials from Pepsi, although not specifically about the iTunes promotion. Between now and the end of March Pepsi will be randomly seeding 100 million free downloads from the iTunes Music Store. It’s really a shame I drink Coke.

Download “Pepsi iTunes – I Fought The Law” Video (6.5 MB, QuickTime)

I wasn’t sure at first if I wanted to go see The Phantom of the Opera, but after seeing it tonight I’m really glad I decided to go. It was an amazing performance, much better than I had anticipated. That always seems to be the case with these shows; I never have high enough expectations for them. But the show really was great: good music, excellent voices, elaborate sets, and even some pyrotechnics thrown in for good measure. The thing that always impresses me the most about live shows is the amount of creativity that goes into making the best use of the sets. With Hollywood effects making their way into everyday television shows, you have to appreciate the people who come up with such clever solutions to working with a medium as limiting as the stage. So Phantom was really good. Go see it if you get the chance.

With a constant eye (and ear?) out looking for new music and means of obtaining it, Warp Records struck me as an interesting label today. Based in the U.K., they offer a few dozen artists, most of them playing music that would be classified as some sub-genre of electronica. If there’s a chance you’ve heard of any of these artist, the one you would have heard of is Aphex Twin. What really caught my attention was their newly released music download store, Bleep, with high-quality DRM-free MP3s. It’s always nice to be able to do what you like with the music you buy. The $1.35 per track price is slightly more than iTunes, but most albums are available for $9.99.

I spent some time tonight playing around with Reason 2.5. It’s a software synth studio that lets you set up a virtual rack of equipment including synthesizers, drum machines, digital effects, a vocoder, and a bunch of other realistic looking devices. The coolest part of it all is that you can turn around the rack and wire everything up yourself. The concept behind it is ingenious and intuitive, at least for those familiar with this type of equipment. I’ve been thinking some lately about doing something musical again. After giving up on guitar pretty fast, and letting numerous years of piano playing fall away, there must be something that I can pick up and enjoy doing. I’m going to look around for a MIDI controller to borrow or buy cheaply to use with Reason to see if this is something I want to do more of. It’s just too cool not to.

In another brilliant move by Apple, Steve has finally found a way to produce a low price iPod. The new models are rumored to be produced in capacities of 2GB and 4GB and come in a variety of colors and patterns, with pricing starting at $100. This can only be good news for those hoping that the Windows Media format never becomes as prevalant as Microsoft’s operating system. So far ever major music downloading pay service besides Apple is distributing WMA files. Hopefully these new mini-’pods will help to keep people away from the format and embrace the iTunes Music Store as the music service provider of choice.

After waiting for more than two weeks, my iPod posters arrived from France today, sealed up in a four foot length of PVC with duct tape on the ends. And they’re big. Really big. The dimensions on paper don’t do near enough justice to the shear vastness these things occupy. And they’re in four stunning colors that are sure to forever memorialize Apple’s third generation music player on my walls. Now the search begins for some suitable framing device.

Winamp has been my MP3 player of choice since the first time I used it at the dawn of the Internet music age, while Napster was still fresh and relatively underground. Since that time, the basic Winamp player hasn’t changed a whole lot. Winamp 3 was released, but, in my opinion, this was a pathetic attempt at an update that would attract more users based on funky skins alone. It was beta (or alpha?) software distributed as a final release, and would never see a single bug fix during it’s one year lifetime. It was so bad, in fact, that the Nullsoft crew went back and updated the older Winamp 2 code to add some of the better features from 3, including video support and a rudimentary media library.

It appears that Nullsoft has come through with another new Christmas-time delivery this year, with the advent of Winamp 5. Ars Technica was quick out of the gates with a post on the release. Hyped as “Winamp 2 plus Winamp 3 equals Winamp 5,” they have apparently “decided to set things straight by merging the best of both code sets.” I haven’t given it a thorough trial yet, but if I find this is a worthy upgrade to my faithful 2.91 version, I’ll be sure to write about it here.

Earlier this week while visiting a Mac rumor site, I did something that I never do. I clicked on a banner ad. It was for an Apple memorobilia site. Browsing this site started me on a hunt for an item that would express my true feelings for the little white and chrome gadget that I have come to love over the last few months. After searching for quite some time, I came across an amzing find: four huge posters from the current iPod ad campaign, straight from the glass cases of French bus stops. As soon as I saw them I knew they had to be mine. I won’t go into all the details here, but after a short struggle and a mistake or two, I put my name on the whole set.